Build a financial plan now to grow your landscape business

Getting a landscaping business off the ground is no easy task. In the beginning, it was all about establishing your customer base, sourcing tools and equipment, building a marketing strategy, and growing your base of operations – things of that nature.

Through hard work, grit and a little luck, you’ve found yourself firmly entrenched in your community and ready for that next big stage of growth. 

A step-by-step growth plan becomes your roadmap to success.

Growing a business calls for financial planning – an important (if a bit of a slog) effort made easier by modern landscape business software. 

Most lawn care and landscaping service startups choose their operational processes by narrow criteria:

1. Cheap

2. Easy-to-use

Which mostly likely worked well for the first one to five years you were in business. Things such as:

• Magnetic whiteboards for scheduling

• Excel spreadsheets for estimate calculations

• Word documents for sending estimates to customers

• QuickBooks and Acumatica for financial planning

But as you move into new verticals and acquire new customers, your existing siloed processes become rife with errors, miscalculations, and forgotten steps. As you build momentum for the future, give your small business the structure it needs to accelerate through the $5 million in annual revenue milestone and beyond.

When landscaping businesses fail to plan, they plan to fail

Developing a landscaping business plan that helps you project growth and measure company performance can be done in one of two ways.

✘ With endless spreadsheets and a trusty calculator by your side, or...

✓ Through data-forward techniques that eliminate the risk of redundant data and spreadsheet formula errors. 

A landscaping business plan template will only get you so far. While it helps to structure your ambitious-but-undefined goals for the future, you need operational insight to give your plan a starting point.

Aspire landscaping business software is the competitive advantage you need to develop a dynamic business model that adapts to the challenges and opportunities of the landscaping and lawn care industry.

If you’re just getting started on your business plan, consider these four steps:

• 12-Month and 4-Year P&L Forecast

• Projected Cash Flow Statements

• Smart Balance Sheet

• Break-Even Analysis

Maybe you’re already forecasting exactly where you want to be this time next year or four years from now. You still need an all-in-one solution to connect that data with other parts of your landscaping business plan.

Get the tools your landscaping company needs to streamline and optimize.

Of course, you know your business better than anyone. The ins and outs, the day-to-day, and where clients and people in your community can benefit from your services.

→ You know where your business operations can be better optimized. But maybe you don’t have the structure you need to execute change.

Business management software has the tools your business needs to lead the landscaping industry.

Aspire software is a partner to landscaping companies, providing end-to-end functionality landscaping companies, providing end-to-end functionality that’s customized to the green industry and works the way you do. Our platform offers:

• Flexible profit and loss reporting tools that allow you to create cash-flow projections

• A simulated balance sheet to empower responsive management

• Break-even calculations for confidence in growth initiatives and business planning

• An ROI calculator to discover opportunities for cost savings, increased operational efficiencies, and streamlined financial planning

You can go ahead and download our operational plan template and make the most of your financial projections.

Start brainstorming for your landscaping and lawn care business plan.

This free operational business guide will help you start thinking of efficient ways to optimize your operations and plan for the future. 

And if you want more overall growth strategies, download our comprehensive growth hacking ebook for landscapers.

FAQs

How profitable is a landscaping business?

Landscapers operate at anywhere between 15 and 40 percent profit. This figure depends on several factors, both in and out of the control of business owners, including:

• Operating costs: such as labor costs, equipment maintenance, and job materials

• Verticals: profit margins vary between residential and commercial services

• Service area: labor costs align with the cost of living in your area

No single figure summarizes how profitable a landscaper will be, and profit margins adjust with a company’s growth cycle. Understanding your profit margin enables you to invest in your business with confidence.

How do landscaping businesses make money?

If you’re not operating in a way to empower growth across all your market segments, sample business plans offer recommended strategies to improve your profit margins:

• Raise prices: Precision insight into your job costs enables you to give your customers pricing visibility when it’s time to raise your service rates.

• Cost cutting: When you use management software to unify and streamline operations, you eliminate redundancies and unnecessary expenses.

• New customers: Developing or revamping a marketing plan can help bring on new clients for new revenue.

If you’re struggling to maintain a profit margin that enables you to invest in your company and drive scalability, a business plan backed by robust management software can release new profitability.

Is it hard to start a landscaping business?

What makes a successful business idea versus a doomed startup is the passion that the business owner brings to their work every day. Landscaping, lawn care, and horticulture are challenging industries because of the following:

• The physical work

• Unpredictable weather

• Competitive market

On the other hand, all it takes to start your own landscaping business is a mission statement and a lawn mower.

The true challenges come after the first year, when new business growth forces you to increase your labor, purchase more equipment, and expand beyond lawn care services.

As you discover pain points in your operational processes, it may be time to revise your business plan or redefine your executive summary to describe how you’ll scale in the future.